Category: Phobia and Depression

Here’s a wild thought: it’s our socio-economic structure that is causing most of our distress and misery today.

We’ll even go a little further: it leading us into mental and physical illness. After all, human beings cannot live in balance if society is out of balance. The dynamics between the individual’s internal problems and the resultant social difficulties has rarely been studied … and never with the clarity and vision we’ll introduce today.

Stress as a consequence of social sickness, led by the most unbalanced individuals in our society today – our leaders – and what we need to do to improve it. Provocative stuff today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head.

It can be crippling and terrifying. And it´s the third largest mental health care problem in the world.

What is going on behind our fears and anxieties?

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else´s Head, we´ll take another look at this important social health concern.

First, an announcement, especially for my Canadian listeners to this Podcast. I´ll be in Canada over the next couple of weeks visiting family and friends. If you´re in the Victoria/Vancouver area drop me an e-mail. I´d love to get together with any who are interested in talking about Norberto Keppe´s work. rich@richjonesvoice.com

If you´re in the Greater Toronto area, I´ll be giving a lecture for any who want to know more about Keppe´s important discoveries and how they can help you in all aspects of your life. Loyal listeners to Thinking with Somebody Else´s Head, Lynne MacDonnell and Jason Coombs have very generously offered their meeting room space. My presentation there will be on Tuesday night, July 31, at 7:00 pm. Lynne is psychotherapist and hypnotherapist in Toronto, and her address is 2489 Bloor St. W., suite 306. Write me if you need more information.

A few weeks ago, I interviewed psychoanalyst, Leo Lima, about fears, panic and phobias. I had a number of responses to that program that prompted me to address the subject again. Lori wrote me from New York City about her claustrophobia and wondered how to get copies of Claudia Pacheco´s book, Healing Through Consciousness, which we mentioned in that program. This is a seminal book about psycho-somatic illness, I can get copies of it for you if you let me know you´re interested. rich@richjonesvoice.com

I´ve invited Markku Lyyra to join me today. Markku´s a Finnish psychoanalyst at Keppe´s International Society of Analytical Trilogy, and he has wide-ranging clinical experience treating clients from Europe and Latin America. He has many practical clinical examples this time to help us get to the bottom of these debilitating problems. Markku gives many lectures on this issue. Let´s explore this important issue more deeply today.

It hits you out of nowhere. For no apparent reason. Its effects are paralyzing. Fear. Of elevators. Of leaving the home. Of fear itself. In the middle of it, you feel like you’ll never climb out. In those moments, it’s exactly as Goethe so eloquently put it … “even in the greatest of evils the fear of the worst continues to haunt us.”

Today on Thinking with Somebody Else’s Head, we’ll penetrate the mysterious world of fear, panic and phobias. If you’re a sufferer, or know someone who is, you’ll find some real clarity today. These conditions are not as murky or impetnetrable as you might think.

By the way, my book offer is still open. Free copies of Norberto Keppe’s Liberation of the People: The Pathology of Power are available. You might think this has no connection to today’s topic, but Keppe’s books are therapeutic in the deepest sense of that word. His studies into psychopathology are unmatched in the history of psychological, philosophical and even theological thought, and I know any introduction to his work will open your eyes to a deeper understanding of all aspects of the human condition. Just write me at rich@richjonesvoice.com if you’d like a copy.

Like most of us, I’ve had friends who’ve suffered from the debilitating effects of fear and panic. From the outside, it can seem so ridiculous. How can you be afraid of that, we say in disbelief. But to the sufferer it’s all too real. I had a friend years ago who couldn’t walk out on the roof of the old office building we worked in together because he had a fear he’d jump off. When I came to Brazil 6 years ago, and I began to study Keppe’s work, I began to understand many neurotic conditions like this one. I began to see that all of our outside difficulties have personal, psychological connections inside us. Our reaction to outside events is more a question of the outside thing mirroring something to us about what’s going on inside us. That’s what we’ll look at today.

Oh and by the way, I think my friend’s fear of jumping was consciousness to him of how self-destructive he was in his life, but didn’t want to see. On the roof, he had consciousness of this, but thought this feeling was unique to being on the roof.

Let’s, if you’ll pardon the pun, dive in and see if we can de-mystify this area.

Leo Lima is a psychoanalyst at Norberto Keppe’s Integral Psychoanalysis clinic here in São Paulo. He attends clients in person and by phone from North America and Europe. Let’s find out what he has to say from his extensive clinical experience.